This document discusses how cities are hubs of mobility and circulation at various scales, from individual to global. It argues that modern planning envisioned mobility and transport improving urban life, but the reality is more complex. While elites benefit from new hypermobile lifestyles, the majority have less control over their mobility and may face barriers. Cities are central nodes in global networks of finance, trade, migration and communication, but this unevenly impacts populations. Mobility is now commodified and some groups are forcibly immobilized as a form of social control. Overall mobility patterns reinforce uneven development within the unequal geographies of global capitalism.

1. Mobile Cities
Prof. Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. Introduction:
Cities are Engines of Mobility and Circulation
• Intensity of urban life sustained by
many simultaneous flows,
mobilities and circulations
operating at wide variety of scales:
from the body to the transnational
• Such flows within and between cities
help to constitute processes of
urbanisation and neoliberal
globalisation at same time

3. Mobility, Modernity
& Urban ‘Progress’
• Speeding-up and improving transport
and communications long been seen
by urban planning and urban
imaginaries as means of instilling
‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ to
benefit all and create a better or
utopian urban future
• Modernity = sense of perpetual
transformation through new
technology, mobility, innovation etc

4. Modern Planning Utopias Stressed Progress Through
Emancipatory and Transformative Mobilities
(e.g.Le Corbusier's 1925 Plan Voisin for central Paris)
Implications for notions of order, security, scale
& politics of city?

5. • New systems of
mobility, transport,
communication and
circulation allow
cities and urban life
to become
increasingly
interconnected and
globalised
• “time-space
compression”

6. ‘Time-Space Compression’
• New transport and communications advantages
accelerate the flows between cities
• Space and time barriers ‘compressed’
• Economic globalisation (finance, capital,
investment, trade, labour)
• Social globalisation: migration, tourism, people
trafficking
• Also cultural globalisation (e.g. global media
events moving around between cities)
• Cities at the heart of all these: Urban everyday life
involves constant links to far-off cities and places
• Need to look at multiple scales at the same time:
From body to Globe

7. Parallel Growth of Physical
and Electronic Mobilities

8. Similar global geographies of both
(Internet flows top, BA’s air network bottom)

9. • Seeing cities as
processes of mobility and
circulation helps in
‘grounding’ discussions
about globalization
• A dynamic, material urban
process emerges based
on role of cities as hubs of
flows of people, capital,
finance, technology,
information, waste,
energy, water, and so on
• Right: container port

10. ‘Mobilities Turn” in Urban Studies

11. 1990s Neoliberal Idea of
Globalization Centred on
the Myths of the
‘Friction Free
Capitalism,’ the ‘End of
Geography,’ or the
‘Death of Distance’
i.e. a ‘flat world’
becoming more
homogenous and
egalitarian

12. But this is a Myth!: Real Situation Marked by Extremes of
Uneven Development Within International Divisions of
Wealth and Labour
• Far from overcoming geographical
unevenness, they help dominant
firms to exploit differences between
places
• Connective infrastructures and the
flows they sustain vital in supporting
what is known as the new
international division of labour of
globalized capitalism within which
cities are key hubs
• People and places are in starkly
different positions to burgeoning
mobility.

13. An ‘Archipeligo’ Economy with
Extended ‘Divisions of Labour’

14. In Control: Global
Socioeconomic Elites are also
‘Kinetic Elites’ who gain their
power from hypermobility
“Global
Capitalist
Classes”

15. Global Airports are Key Nodes

16. Explosion & Congestion in Transnational Mobilities
(Heathrow Tracks)

17. Transnational Lives

18. Benefit from new
‘premium’ urban
transport
emerging with
splintering
urbanism

19. Seamless,
Synchronised,
Coordination
‘Just-In-Time’
Flows

20. Export Processing and Free Trade Zones:
Spaces of ‘Glocal’ Mobilities

21. ‘Global Cities’ are Key Mobility Hubs: Loughborough
University’s Inventory of World Cities

22. These also act as Cosmopolitan Hubs of
‘Diasporic’ Migration Networks
• Dominant or ‘Alpha’ Global Cities
mostly in Global North: London, New
York, Tokyo
• Status as economic power-houses
makes them extremely
‘cosmopolitan’ cities
• Central hubs in hundreds of
international migration and cultural
networks sustaining countless
‘disporas’ of communities from all
over the world (Pakistani Diaspora
and London street; next: London)

24. Such Cities are also Central Hubs on Global
Airline Networks…(BA)

25. Airport the
Iconic Site
of
Globalizing
Urbanism
Key Nodes
Demarcated
Through
Signature
Architectures

26. ..Such cities are also key hubs on
Transnational Optic Fibre Grids

27. New types
of automobile
culture
Local
Bypass
‘Smart’
Highways use
price to speed-up
and remove congestion

28. Decongestion Through Commodified Roadspace

29. Tourist Cities
• Increasingly important:
cities constructed or
repackaged as fantasy
landscapes of escape
• Primarily or exclusively
for visitors but rely on
massive cheap, local or
imported labour forces
• Las Vegas, Cancun
(Mexico)

30. Good Example of How Internet Technology
Supports New Types of Physical Mobility

31. Those Not in Control: Also large ‘kinetic underclass’: Poverty
and powerlessness increasingly shaped by immobility, dangerous
mobility, or lack of control over one’s mobilities
(beggar, Indonesian public transport, African on Spanish beach, Mexican jumping US border)

32. Neoliberal Capitalism relies on labour being a lot less
mobile than capital: Many attempts to cross fortifying
borders or ‘Political equator’ Separating Global North
and South (right, San Diego/Tijuana)

33. e.g. Global People Trafficking Geographies

34. Sometimes Kinetic elites and kinetic underclasses operate
through colonial geographies e.g. Jewish-only highway
vs.. Palestinian checkpoint on West Bank

35. Also water pipes in
Mumbai: Proximity
and Access Very
Different Things

36. Forced immobility also used as punishment
and humiliation e.g. ASBO
Neoliberalisisng states all characterised by
rapid increases in incarcerated populations
e.g US

37. e.g. 4: Toxic Wastes
• Global Flows away from richer
cities where waste is generated
to less resistant and poorer cities
and regions with no or lax
environmental protection
desperate for even very poor
quality work
• Highly controversial when such
flows seen to be going ‘wrong’
way e.g. ‘ghost ships’,
Hartlepool, 2004 (right)

38. e.g. 5 Splintering Urbanism
At city level, as we saw last
week, a proliferation of
‘hard’ enclaves that come
with Splintering Urbanism
These undermine idea of the
city as an open and relatively
free space of mobility and
mixing
Bring in checkpoints so that
rights of access have to be
proven before entering

39. ‘Camp’ like architectures and security zones e.g.
Finance districts in London and Manhattan

40. In urban streets and
malls shift towards
security-obsessed
‘Jittery Space’
Moral Panics
and Cultures
of Fear
Boundary
Transgressors
as Deviants

41. Conclusion
“The city is a gearbox full of speeds”
McKenzie Wark, 2001
Far from being the ‘death of distance’ for all, as in the myth
of neoliberal globalisation, the new geographies of mobility
are being used to slow down or prevent mobilities deemed
risky, unprofitable or malign to enhance or add power to
those deemed virtuous, risk-free or profitable